


The earth will remember you

by macabremagpie



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Horror, M/M, Other, Psychological Horror, Slow Build, Slow Burn, but like, have fun, the opposite of a speedrun of it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-18 07:28:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29605965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/macabremagpie/pseuds/macabremagpie
Summary: "Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see."
Relationships: Jesse McCree/Hanzo Shimada
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	The earth will remember you

**Author's Note:**

> My grandmother always used to say that if you don't write down dreams you have more than twice they are likely to happen to you.  
> This fic is based on a dream I've consistently been having since I could remember.  
> It will center on McHanzo and will be a horrible slow burn if I have anything to say about it.  
> Also supernatural things, mythology, and horror are going to be a big part of this.  
> Also probably gore because really there's little horror without gore.  
> Enjoy.

The spirits whisper.

Voices of long dead creatures, bouncing like grasshoppers off of withering hart's tongue, scampering up the scar-faced willow trees.

They tell him of witch-things roaming the land, carrying kernels of corn and cups filled with blood, building mounds of rot-red dirt and sticks, playing with dolls and calling to rye-wolves. They speak in a long forgotten tongue - of skinned knees and a mothers warmth. Of bread crumbled in messy trails. Of smiling eyes, of teeth in the dark.

They speak of fathers digging graves, bloodied knuckles and missing ears.

They speak of children dancing at graves, their eyes soot black and mouths sewn shut.

They speak of mothers lying in graves, waiting to shed hair and skin and teeth.

Waiting, waiting, waiting.

Hungry, hungry, hungry.

* * *

A man enters the woods.

"He is shrouded in fire, mother," the spirits cry as they follow him and his horse, "Mother, mother, he has come to end us all."

The gunslinger pays them no attention, steadfastly moving his mount along the path. With every step his golden spurs jingle and glint in the dying light, and the cigar in his mouth moves with a song that stays trapped behind his teeth. Sweet smoke trails after him.

The woods ahead are vast and miserable and dark, his path shrouded in a low laying mist and flanked by ghostly birches swaying like drunk maidens in the twilight. The crying trees move with him, reaching for him with their hair-like branches and dried-up leaves. Their every touch drains and invigorates in turn, the leaves turning vibrant while the man greys and withers. 

The man slowly lists forward. His horse whinnies in anger, speeding into a gallop. 

Wild, hungry things.

The trees howl.

* * *

In the vast woods a hunting thing stirs.

There is a man on a path, the path, its path. He is weak. Frail. Breakable. 

Hungry, hungry, hungry.

The hunting thing slithers into the soil.

Waiting, waiting, waiting.

* * *

He passes over a ravine, and the difference of this world compared to the one behind him is cutting.

The land is bare here. No trees, no underbrush, no moss. Long gone are the thick woods and high-grown pines that once ruled this soil. All that remains now are tree trunks jutting like amputated limbs from the drought bitten earth. In the persisting twilight of the day the world looks akin to a battlefield.

Stopping his mount, the withered old man looks around.

A bird-call sounds in the distance, pitched slightly wrong. An imitation, cheap and poor. A hunting thing, preying on the last few lost things still roaming these woods, for birds have long since fled this gathering place of all dead things. All that remains is echoes of life that once was. His stare falls to wraiths of deer running in the distance, eyes dulled black, dainty ankles slit and bleeding - carriers of souls, once upon a time, until humanity abandoned their holy grounds of worship to ruin and demons. Behind them, a trail of blue.

He dismounts and leaves the path.

A bird calls in the distance, laughing. Hungry, hungry, hungry.

* * *

The man sings, and the air stirs with heat, and the sky overhead wheels itself into hues of violet and cobalt and blue. Night comes. Darkness envelopes the world.

Carefully, he makes his way towards the blue line trailing after the wraiths. On his way he touches every cut tree, sings to it in a quiet, sad tone, and the trees cry in return. Gradually his back straightens, his stride lengthens, and the colour returns to his hair. With every sung note the wrinkles fade. 

The trees fade into the soil.

Seconds pass, and torches flare in the night. They guide the man towards the glowing blue line, give him just enough light to see the obsidian tears dripping from iridescent blue-capped mushrooms. He reaches for his pouch and rummages around, then slowly pulls out a glass box and golden pincers. Slowly he separates each drop from the scales. They liquify the instant they hit the glass container, and the pincers hiss angrily with every contact.

When done, he lays the glass box on the ground, clasps his hands above it and prays.

* * *

A fog takes the ground.

The man turns, stare cutting into the ravine to his right. Bare land and pooling darkness, wisps of fog and the smell of frost carried on the incoming wind. Eyes, reflective like shards of glass, staring back. Waiting teeth, a grin made for war.

Slowly, a shape uncurls from the stardust fog, raising itself from the rotting earth with snake like grace. The head of a bull, split open between its milky eyes. Horns curved in a dangerous forward arc, below them long, malnourished arms and fingers like a spiders legs, claws hooked and dripping blood. They tremble and grasp at empty air.

It moves forward. The earth rumbles beneath its writing muscles as it slowly winds its way across the ground, hissing and yowling, clicking bull teeth frothed with blood.

Hungry, hungry, hungry.

It makes a sound, a sound like a sparrow rendered apart, a sound like a hunting eagle but held too long - the man runs.

The snake lumbers after him. Trees fall and roll into the ravine as the beast propels itself forward. When the man risks a glance behind, he sees it slam itself into the side of the hill, leaves and red soil flying through the air, uprooted torches scorching the dried earth. Its head turns, bull-eyes drooping crookedly out of their sockets. Looking closer, the head seems sown on. He clicks his tongue and slides down a slope towards his path.

He looks around.

His horse is gone.

* * *

His boots hit the path with a sound like bones breaking.

The air here is so thick with the smell of stale rainwater it is almost impossible to breathe. Puddles line the path in the place where he left his horse. He slips on one and falls to the other side of the raised path.

Deciding to do the best with this situation he presses his back to the soil and flings his serape to the side, sliding his hand into the pouch at his hip, rummaging frantically until he drags out a golden pocket watch. It is stained brown with age but still ticks faithfully. The decrepit golden chain winds itself around his steel wrist. The world stills.

Finally, he can breathe.

Raising his head above the line of the path he glances backwards.

The lumbering ghoul is caught mid-movement, tearing apart the ground and surrounding trees in its path, but it all seems to be happening in slow motion, the pieces of bark and lumps of dirt moving through the air at the most sedate of paces. Slowly, he reaches to his hip, where Peacekeeper is calling his name. He pulls her from the holster.

He aims.

A shot rings in the night. Then another. And another.

The lumbering beast falls, body pooling back into the fog, bullhead laid forgotten at the side of the road. It opens its mouth, a dying howl.

The man sings with it, mourning.

* * *

Days pass.

His horse is nowhere to be found, so he makes his way forward by foot. The world changes - now he once again walks in lush forests, yet no animals stir the undergrowth. No foxes disturb the slow sway of cattails, no bees buzz around the eternally flowering elder.

The woods are still excepting the giggles and titters following him.

_There is a man in our woods, mother. He will not turn from his path. He will not heed the owl's song, he will not bend to the pleading wind._

_There is a man in our woods, mother. Wreathed in flames, carrying iron, wielding wickedness and sin.  
_

_There is a man in our woods, mother. He will slaughter us all._

* * *

Time passes, but then again, that means nothing here.

The woods around him grow thicker and thinner by stretches, but never truly seem to have any intention to end. Sometimes, at the parts where trees have crowded the path, he feels the brush of branches at his cheeks - he refuses to turn away, allows nature the small comfort of fleeting warmth that touching him provides. He does not think of the birches.

The darkness around him suffocates, feels like home. He breathes in, and he smells nothing. Absence of time sterilizes the world, does away with the familiar smells of musty leaves and wet earth, catches rain before it can hit either leaf or bark - the absence of time forbids nature to be nature, to groom life into existence.

He has seen it before. In the places humanity forgot, the hidden cradles where life was first born. The caves, and grottos, and canyons; stone walls filled with pictures so fresh the colours still run, the smell of berries still carries with the wind sometimes. The hidden corners of the world where life simply stopped because there was no one to urge it on - time has grown used to and lives with humans, loves them for all they are flawed and distrusting; they have given it life and purpose. It moves with them, around them, for them, capricious and mean but so, so grateful that it tends to forget the places humanity doesn't acknowledge.

He reaches for his wrist and opens the watch; the smallest hand barely touching the three, the largest twenty paces behind. Witching hour, whether it be day or night is another question altogether.

He closes it along with his eyes, counts the seconds and minutes in his head, and comes to a stop as the watch strikes three. He opens his eyes and looks around.

Next to him is an obviously man made mound of dirt. It is stuck full of thick sticks entwined with thinner, hair-like twigs and braids of fabric so old nature has stolen their colours, frayed at the edges and swaying in a non-existent breeze.

Offerings of blue ceramic cups litter the blood-red soil, some shattered completely and some barely cracked, filled with something that once could have been called liquid but is now a solid black mess. There are three puppets half-buried in a semi-triangle shape, staring at him with soulless eyes. They look like the kind of toys children used to make, long before factories existed to make them instead. Ears of corn, skinned and dried. Yellowed leaves bound together by strips of grass to make arms, pale corn silk twisted into braids and knots of all shapes. The eyes two black spots pressed messily into the cobs with ash from corn wolves. 

Practice golems, the parents of the children used to call them while smiling.

His head turns to the left.

Where there were up until now thick trunks of beech trees and red pine now stretches a meadow, high over a hill and dipping into a valley run through by a crooked stream. It warbles excitedly, alive like nothing else in this forest. There are wooden stairs pressed into the hillside, flanked by carved rails and strips of billowing bright red fabric. There is a woman scaling the stairs.

He watches the way she drags her left foot. Takes note of the way her arm won't quite stay still, fluttering as if it were just a hollowed out piece of skin. There's an unnatural sheen to her black hair, like an oil spill in the sun, and her skin seems ashen and sickly.

She gets to the top of the hill and turns her head. Well over a hundred meters separate them, but the man can still see the odd blackness to her eyes, and the catlike split in her upper lip. Her mouth curls up at the sides. She marches on, past the overgrown evergreens guarding the final resting place of the dead, up the hand-laid stone pathway, right up to a grave in the upper right corner. Its well kept, with vibrantly alive chrysanthemums and forget-me-nots, the marble grave-stone polished to a shine. Obviously loved.

With the healthy hand the woman lifts off the heavy stone and lays it carefully to the side. Then, grasping her hair at the place her skull meets her neck, she pulls. Her skin peels off, revealing blood-red muscle and tendons. She seems eaten away at, with musculature missing to the point her inner organs droop to the side and backwards around her spine. She pushes them back carelessly, seemingly engrossed in whatever she has found in the hole. 

She pulls out the body of a woman. Peels the skin much like she did her own, then carefully steps into the feet as if she were simply putting on a different pair of trousers. She pulls it up, over her dropping innards, towards her shoulders, over her face.

She turns.

His mother stares back at him, and she smiles.

The man moves on.

* * *

He finds his horse.

The beast is grazing on thorns in the next meadow he passes, seemingly unconcerned with the fact is has eaten its lips and gums bloody.

There is water pooling in spots where it has grazed, and a small stream has formed where it has apparently been resting a few moments earlier.

He calls for it and the animal stills. It seems, at that moment, as alive as anything else in this god forsaken forest. He feels his back turning wet. Maybe sweat, but the smell of rainwater is heavy around him. He tries to remember when, exactly, he mounted the animal. How it came to be in his possession. His mind comes away blank.

Slowly he moves closer, hand carefully around Peacekeepers grip. Slowly, the horse moves so it stares at him with both eyes. Blood froths its mouth with every breath. It's knees are scraped to the bones. The front hooves grip the dirt like fused fingers. He looks back up just in time to see the horse's eyes fade to a milky white, rolling in their sockets - its head seems to swivel about its neck like its tendons are cut, lips pulled back over its teeth in a bastardly approximation of a sneer. The neck curls backwards, head at a broken angle. It looks at him upside down, eyes wheeling, unseeing yet seemingly cutting straight into his soul as they try and fail to focus onto him. The animal opens its mouth.

"The dusk of life. An arrow. A dragons tooth. The serpent. A man in blazing cloth. The fog that consumes the world."

Blood froths at its teeth. The man falls to his knees, a sound like bones breaking.

"Dusk, and dawn, and the midday sun, brighter than anything the world will see, eons to come."

His hands shake, his heart stops and sputters on and off again.

"Helios, at death."

He opens his eyes to a world sparking with light.

* * *

He is on a horse, moving steadily on a winding path. His hand, clutched at Peacekeeper, is hidden under his serape. There is a pocket watch clinking steadily against his metal wrist.

His back is dry.

He rides on.

A tunnel of darkness, trees bent over the pathway, branches tangled and fused. At the end, a spear of light. Shoots of green and pink, of yellow and lavender - he spurs his horse into a run, drained, tired.

He speeds to the end of a nightmare.

The light grows brighter, larger, encompassing. His eyes take in sprouts of fresh leaves, the brownness of the dying ones. The bushes of white blackthorns, mounds of vibrant hairy violets, the reaching cow parsley, the lazing meadow buttercups. He breathes in the smell of flowering elder, of seeding penny buns, of curly chanterelles. The woods come alive around him, the sound of songbirds carrying on the wind. The red pelt of a fox gleams from the undergrowth, scurrying through waist high cat tails and a sea of unfurling wire ferns.

He hits the wall of light, and comes to the other side feeling better than he had in days. Air seems to return. For the first time in a good long while he can breathe like he isn't expecting the world to punch it right out out of him again.  
  
He has arrived at his destination.

The strange wooden cottage in the distance seems a bastion of safety after the ride through the woods, so he carefully guides his horse towards it. A stone path ticks beautifully under his horses hooves, but the animal seems skittish between his thighs still, as if waiting for something.

The closer he gets to the house the more curious it seems. The windows and door are covered with heavy iron and some kind of runes, and the surroundings are full of overgrown mourning willows and high rise red pines, all the flowerbeds planted full of jasmine and rosemary, with lavender sticking out like purple flags from between the road's flagstones. His eyes cut to what seems like a barn next to it, warded by hazelnut and walnut trees so old their trunks could be hugged by three people without their hands touching. Gentle neighing is coming from behind the doors, and his horse speeds up.

Shivers take him once he realizes where his horse is actually headed. Hidden behind the thick trees is a pond, surrounded by popped open bulrushes and high grown grass. All of a sudden his hands seem to melt into his horse, and the stench of rainwater is so thick in his nostrils he has to breathe through his mouth. The mane of the animal turns soggy, kelp like. The flesh seems to melt off its body, leaving only skin and bone, fur going slick with slime and what seems like pond scum.

At once he realizes he's going to drown if he doesn't save himself.

Desperately he cracks his magic like a whip across the binds holding him to the kelpie, and the flesh of the beast gives its hold on him. He tears his hands out and falls backwards on his ass just as the horse's forelegs start melting seamlessly into the still surface of the pond. It looks back at him with frog-slit eyes.

"Mind the wolf, coyote, for he will eat you alive."

Shaken he gets to his feet and nearly runs to the barred door of the cottage.

A woman opens the door just as he's about to knock on it.

She looks like no one he's ever known and at the same time like everyone he's ever held dear. She smiles; it's soft, lopsided. Her teeth are crooked on the right side, but not on the left. She opens her mouth -

"Hello, Jesse."

* * *

The gunslinger wakes up.

There's someone in his house.


End file.
